Generally, in hardware system architectures such as x86 and Itanium system hardware architectures, a processor, such as a central processing unit (Central Processing Unit, abbreviated as CPU), and an input/output centralized controller (Input/Output Hub or Input/Output Controller Hub, abbreviated as IOH or ICH) are connected to each other through a bus, so as to transmit data. In such hardware system architectures, multiple processors and multiple IOHs may exist at the same time, and each IOH may be connected to multiple input/output (Input/Output, abbreviated as IO or I/O) devices. Multiple bridge devices may be integrated in the IOH, and a bus extending from the bridge device is connected to the processor through a first bus (Bus0) in the system.
Taking x86 and Itanium system hardware architectures for example, a procedure after a system running on hardware system architecture is started is that system firmware (System Firmware) programs fixed in a Flash Read-Only Memory (Flash ROM) run first, where the System Firmware is responsible for configuring and detecting all hardware devices, such as a processor, a memory, and an IO bus, in a server, so as to ensure that the hardware system can work normally, and then the System Firmware is responsible for searching for an operating system loader (Operating System Loader, abbreviated as OS Loader) in a storage device in the system, and invoking the OS Loader to load operating system kernel programs. Although multiple processors (which may be several hundreds in a large server) may exist in the hardware system, when a current System Firmware initializes system IO buses, for example, enumerating IO devices in the system, this work is done merely by one of the processors, and therefore the processor has a special status in the system, i.e. the processor is a system main processor in a Firmware stage. A main reason for that is to keep consistency in allocation of system resources. However, such a process costs much time, and prolongs the time for starting the system, so that a user can't normally use the system until a long time after the system is started, which reduces the satisfaction and product acceptance of the user for the system. In addition, in the product design and development stage, the system is restarted repeatedly to verify whether a modification is valid, and to check the function and performance of the system. If the time for starting the system once is very long, the efficiency for product design and development is reduced, which thereby increases the product cost and reduces the product competitiveness.